"Grammarly curated a list of real people, gave its models free rein to hallucinate plausible-sounding advice on their behalf, and put it all behind a subscription. That's a deliberate choice to monetize the identities of real people without involving them, and it sucks." @caseynewton.bsky.social
the analogy is compelling!
Wikipedia was emergency locked to editing for an hour or two last week because someone ran a dormant user script to test if it was safe. It was ... not. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped...
"UK’s multibillion AI drive is built on ‘phantom investments’" www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
There is no funnier train station sign than "Cambridge home of Anglia Ruskin University". Everytime I see it I'm impressed all over again at the level of trolling.
In the same way that I might consider dating Sabrina Carpenter, a nice concept but not really practical, plausible or likely and almost certainly ending with songs condemning it.
KATHLEEN JAMIE The Queen of Sheba Scotland, you have invoked her name just once too often in your Presbyterian living rooms. She’s heard, yea even unto heathenish Arabia your vixen’s bark of poverty, come down the family like a lang neb, a thrawn streak, a wally dug you never liked but can’t get shot of. She’s had enough. She’s come. Whit, tae this dump? Yes! She rides first camel of a swaying caravan from her desert sands to the peat and bracken of the Pentland hills across the fit-ba pitch to the thin mirage of the swings and chute; scattered with glass.
Breathe that steamy musk on the Curriehill Road, not mutton-shanks boiled for broth, nor the chlorine stink of the swimming pool where skinny girls accuse each other of verrucas. In her bathhouses women bear warm pot-bellied terracotta pitchers on their laughing hips. All that she desires, whatever she asks She will make the bottled dreams of your wee lasses look like sweeties. Spangles scarcely cover her gorgeous breasts, hanging gardens jewels, frankincense; more voluptuous even than Vi-next-door, whose high-heeled slippers keeked from dressing gowns like little hooves, wee tails of pink fur stuffed in the cleavage of her toes; more audacious even than Currie Liz who led the gala floats through the Wimpey scheme in a ruby-red Lotus Elan before the Boys’ Brigade band and the Brownies’ borrowed coal-truck; hair piled like candy-floss; who lifted her hands from the neat wheel to tinkle her fingers at her tricks among the Masons and the elders and the police. The cool black skin of the Bible couldn’t hold her, nor the atlas green on the kitchen table, you stuck with thumbs and split to fruity hemispheres – yellow Yemen, Red Sea, Ethiopia. Stick in with the homework and you’ll be
cliver like yer faither. but no too cliver, no above yersel. See her lead those great soft camels widdershins round the kirk-yaird, smiling as she eats avocados with apostle spoons she’ll teach us how. But first she wants to strip the willow she desires the keys to the National Library she is beckoning the lasses in the awestruck crowd ... Yes, we’d like to clap the camels, to smell the spice, admire her hairy legs and bonny wicked smile, we want to take PhDs in Persian, be vice to her president: we want to help her ask some Difficult Questions she’s shouting for our wisest man to test her mettle: Scour Scotland for a Solomon! Sure enough: from the back of the crowd someone growls: whae do you think y’ur? and a thousand laughing girls and she draw our hot breath and shout: THE QUEEN OF SHEBA!
Scotland, you have invoked her name
just once too often
in your Presbyterian living rooms.
She’s heard, yea
even unto heathenish Arabia
your vixen’s bark of poverty…
—Kathleen Jamie, “The Queen of Sheba”
from THE QUEEN OF SHEBA, @bloodaxebooks.bsky.social 1994
A #poem for #InternationalWomensDay
Two scientists walk through a cluttered old-fashioned science laboratory. The female scientist says “Analogue instruments! Paper records! Chalk boards! I thought you'd agreed to modernise the laboratory?” The male scientist replies “That's what i'm so excited about: we have moved to cloud-based storage for our data!” They step out onto a balcony. She says: “Please tell me you haven't built a library zeppelin” This is exactly what he has done. It floats across the sky and he adds “It's got a fax machine!”
My cartoon for this week’s @newscientist.com
The UK used less coal in 2025 than they did in 1600, when Shakespeare was writing Hamlet. Source: buff.ly/Ifmz1Eo
Printed recipe. Text reads ‘For melancholy. Rub the body all over with nettles’
Questionable 1700s treatment for melancholy... rubbing yourself all over with nettles
We are very excited to share the full programme for the London Open Science & Scholarship Festival 2026 and announce that bookings are officially open! ✨
Find all the details on the Open@UCL blog 👉 buff.ly/S7yECkO
![[We see a close up of a young white male, tanned, white teeth, coiffed hair clearly an influencer on social media. It is an image such as you see when social media posts are shown on the news. In the corner of the screen is named a location: DUBAI. He is staring slightly off-camera for several silent panels of the comic strip. His eyes move slightly. He is having a thought.]
From off-screen a newsreader’s commentary comes:
NEWSREADER:
Extraordinary images here
of an expat in Dubai
[The influencer’s eybrows raise slightly]
…Having their first ever geopolitical thought.
[CUT TO a BBC news scene. The BBC newsreader CLIVE MYRIE is talking to an interviewee next to the screen showing the social media influencer’s face. The interviewee’s name is David Jones].
CLIVE MYRIE:
To explain the significance of this moment we’re joined by David Jones, our Expat Thoughts correspondent
DAVID JONES:
Clive, this is momentous
It was caught on film at the end of an Instagram post titled: ‘Dubai Is Brilliant’.
[Pointing at the screen, the influencer’s expression still the same]
You can clearly see in the eyebrows here, the dawning realisation that there *might* be something in the world beyond his dickhead self.
It marks a *huge* departure from all the Dubai Expat’s previous thoughts.
CLIVE MYRIE:
Which are…?
DAVID JONES:
You've Got To Get Yourself Out Here Mate, Everything Is So Clean, I Don't Have To Pay Taxes,
I Am Incurious As To Why I Do Not Have To Pay Taxes, and Spa.
CLIVE MYRIE:
And might we see an expansion of these new Thoughts in coming days?
DAVID JONES:
I think we can expect to see:
“I Deserve To Be Airlifted By A Country I Pay No Tax To”
CLIVE MYRIE:
Mmm.
[Ends]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:4m3we4apbjayclzcnhwe3pfp/bafkreibu6vuc7ofetq5hla3gfcknocotbfl3yk2ajczk6qfd2hnjxrav6q)
[We see a close up of a young white male, tanned, white teeth, coiffed hair clearly an influencer on social media. It is an image such as you see when social media posts are shown on the news. In the corner of the screen is named a location: DUBAI. He is staring slightly off-camera for several silent panels of the comic strip. His eyes move slightly. He is having a thought.] From off-screen a newsreader’s commentary comes: NEWSREADER: Extraordinary images here of an expat in Dubai [The influencer’s eybrows raise slightly] …Having their first ever geopolitical thought. [CUT TO a BBC news scene. The BBC newsreader CLIVE MYRIE is talking to an interviewee next to the screen showing the social media influencer’s face. The interviewee’s name is David Jones]. CLIVE MYRIE: To explain the significance of this moment we’re joined by David Jones, our Expat Thoughts correspondent DAVID JONES: Clive, this is momentous It was caught on film at the end of an Instagram post titled: ‘Dubai Is Brilliant’. [Pointing at the screen, the influencer’s expression still the same] You can clearly see in the eyebrows here, the dawning realisation that there *might* be something in the world beyond his dickhead self. It marks a *huge* departure from all the Dubai Expat’s previous thoughts. CLIVE MYRIE: Which are…? DAVID JONES: You've Got To Get Yourself Out Here Mate, Everything Is So Clean, I Don't Have To Pay Taxes, I Am Incurious As To Why I Do Not Have To Pay Taxes, and Spa. CLIVE MYRIE: And might we see an expansion of these new Thoughts in coming days? DAVID JONES: I think we can expect to see: “I Deserve To Be Airlifted By A Country I Pay No Tax To” CLIVE MYRIE: Mmm. [Ends]
In case the scam here isn't obvious - Grammarly is, without permission, creating little LLM agents based on the work of academics and then claiming this is the same as their "expert opinion" - using their names and reputations for free without consent.
Text on an academic article about "Moving Things: Moving Cartloads of Treasures from Venice to Ethiopia, ca. 1400" pasted into Grammarly in a Browser. It offers to invoke the digital ghosts of David Abulafia, Barry Flood and Chris Wickham to give me "expert feedback".
Using Grammarly for the first time in forever ... WHAT?
As a non-native speaker writing primarily in English, I used to use it to check prepositions, point out too long/convoluted sentences etc.
It now offers to summon colleagues both living and dead to "expert review" the piece???
What?
A man checking his phone in a bar, seen through reflecting windows
Brass hands on a doorway
A gloomy King's Cross canal
Canal boats by King's Cross
September 2025 part two: this was the first time I tried Kentmere 200, I'm quite liking it.
A man checking his phone next to a locked-off underground gate
The outside of St Pancras, with a few tourists and one man looking like he's walked for an hour
Queues at the Euston bus stops
A mostly-empty upstairs canteen at St Pancras
September: stations on a strike day
A light-well in an old building
HMS Belfast looking broody on the Thames
Tower Bridge from below the decking
A very complicated and ornate sculpture of ... harpoons? in a roofed-over plaza
June 2025
(using Shanghai GP3, which is nice and cheap but also surprisingly fiddly to work with - kept twisting. Maybe not worth the saving)
A billboard reading NO FAKE NEWS HERE on an empty street
A dark night-time road with car headlights and a runner on the pavement, city lights behind
A tube station platform seen from the opposite site, with people standing around
An empty Overground carriage
caught up with developing a bag of older film today.
London, early 2025
baffled to realise that the UK apparently regulated against this in (checks notes) 1774. ahead of the trend!
The disorder in the streets was so bad, and disabled or wounded soldiers were treated so badly in the melee, that the London local authorities agitated for the enforcement of queuing at bus and tram stops, that courtesy entirely foreign to the rush-hour Londoner. In December 1917 the LCC organised a conference on how best to achieve this new departure.
The invention of queuing, 1917. (Jerry White, Zeppelin Nights: London in the First World War)
March Andrew Dodds On Sunday gawky and glaiket, For life no carin’ a preen; On Monday lookin’ forsaket, Wi’ a misty weet in her een; On Tuesday as prim as a daisy, And sweet as a maiden can be; On Wednesday cap’rin’ and crazy, Wi’ an eldritch glint in her e’e; On Thursday smilin’ and winsome – Settin’ the blackies a’ gyte; On Friday dowie and dinsome, Fu’ o’ splutter and spite; On Seterday in a white mantle, A daffodil stuck in her hair, She walks doon the dusk wi’ a hantle O’ pride in her sorrowfu’ air.
On Sunday gawky and glaiket,
For life no carin’ a preen;
On Monday lookin’ forsaket,
Wi’ a misty weet in her een;
On Tuesday as prim as a daisy,
And sweet as a maiden can be;
On Wednesday cap’rin’ and crazy,
Wi’ an eldritch glint in her e’e…
—Andrew Dodds, “March”
#Scots #poem #poetry
I forget how much I like the crofters bit in this, with Peggy Ashcroft and John Laurie (who seems to have gone straight to looking about sixty and stayed there his entire career)
here we go (featuring bonus fake-married, Hitchcock was really into the full set)
iplayer currently has the 1935 version of The 39 Steps, which is great fun: plus, for fans of such things, contains an early appearance of "but there's only one bed / oh no" www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/epis...
Archives by Edwin Morgan generation upon generation upon generation upon generation upon generation upon generation upon generation upon generation upon generation upon generation upon generation upon generation upon generation upon generation upon generation upon generation upon generation upon generation upon generation upon generation upon g neration up n g nerat on up n g nerat n up n g nerat n p n g erat n p n g era n p n g era n n g er n n g r n n g n n g n g
Today, 28 February, is Scottish Archives Day. Here’s Edwin Morgan’s poem “Archives”, published in Centenary Selected Poems, @carcanet.bsky.social 2020
@edmorgantrust.bsky.social
#archives #poetry #archives #ScottishArchivesDay
www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/inde...
Shocking no-one, a confirmation - there is no lander, there are no tankers, there is no refuelling process, and now there will be no Artemis III landing. www.scientificamerican.com/article/nasa...
A month later the UCI had slowed to four but the Cameo were up to eleven showings a day, two of their three screens - still something like one in twelve of all film showings in the city. They kept going for three months before (presumably) finally running out of people in the city who'd not seen it.
The UCI ran it on four of twelve screens, the Cameo in Tollcross on one of three, both sold tickets faster than they could imagine, whilst the Dominion in Morningside went on record saying they didn't think it was their sort of thing. Of course they did.
Something I stumbled across a while back: on the day it came out on general release, ~20% of all film showings in Edinburgh cinemas were of Trainspotting. You had a choice of 25, including one at 1.30am the next morning.
